What do we mean when we talk about the “cognitive foundations” of language or the “cognitive principles” behind linguistic phenomena? And how can we tap into the cognitive underpinnings of language? These questions lie at the heart of a workshop that Michael Pleyer and I are going to propose for the next International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Here’s our Call for Papers:

Convenors:
Stefan Hartmann, University of Bamberg
Michael Pleyer, University of Koblenz-Landau

The concept of construal has become a key notion in many theories within the broader framework of Cognitive Linguistics. It lies at the heart of Langacker’s (1987, 1991, 2008) Cognitive Grammar, but it also plays a key role in Croft’s (2012) account of verbal argument structure as well as in the emerging framework of experimental semantics (Bergen 2012; Matlock & Winter 2015). Indirectly it also figures in Talmy’s (2000) theory of cognitive semantics, especially in his “imaging systems” approach (see e.g. Verhagen 2007).

According to Langacker (2015: 120), “[c]onstrual is our ability to conceive and portray the same situation in alternate ways.” From the perspective of Cognitive Grammar, an expression’s meaning consists of conceptual content – which can, in principle, be captured in truth-conditional terms – and its construal, which encompasses aspects such as perspective, specificity, prominence, and dynamicity. Croft & Cruse (2004) summarize the construal operations proposed in previous research, arriving at more than 20 linguistic construal operations that are seen as instances of general cognitive processes.

Given the “quantitative turn” in Cognitive Linguistics (e.g. Janda 2013), the question arises how the theoretical concepts proposed in the foundational works of the framework can be empirically tested and how they can be refined on the basis of empirical findings. Much work in the domains of experimental linguistics and corpus linguistics has established a research cycle whereby hypotheses are generated on the basis of theoretical concepts from Cognitive Linguistics, such as construal operations, and then tested using behavioral and/or corpus-linguistic methods (see e.g. Hilpert 2008; Matlock 2010; Schönefeld 2011; Matlock et al. 2012; Krawczak & Glynn forthc., among many others).

Arguably one of the most important testing grounds for theories of linguistic construal is the domain of language dynamics. Recent years have seen increasing convergence between Cognitive-Linguistic theories on the one hand and theories conceiving of language as a complex adaptive system on the other (Beckner et al. 2009; Frank & Gontier 2010; Fusaroli & Tylén 2012; Pleyer 2017). In this framework, language can be understood as a dynamic system unfolding on the timescales of individual learning, socio-cultural transmission, and biological evolution (Kirby 2012, Enfield 2014). Linguistic construal operations can be seen as important factors shaping the structure of language both on a historical timescale and in ontogenetic development (e.g. Pleyer & Winters 2014).

Empirical studies of language acquisition, language change, and language variation can therefore help us understand the nature of linguistic construal operations and can also contribute to refining theories of linguistic construal. Interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic perspectives can prove particularly insightful in this regard. Findings from cognitive science and developmental psychology can contribute substantially to our understanding of the cognitive principles behind language dynamics. Cross-linguistic comparison can, on the one hand, lead to the discovery of striking similarities across languages that might point to shared underlying cognitive principles (e.g. common pathways of grammaticalization, see e.g. Bybee et al. 1994, or similarities in the domain of metaphorical construal, see Taylor 2003: 140), but it can also safeguard against premature generalizations from findings obtained in one single language to human cognition at large (see e.g. Goschler 2017).

For our proposed workshop, we invite contributions that explicitly connect theoretical approaches to linguistic construal operations with empirical evidence from e.g. corpus linguistics, experimental studies, or typological research. In line with the cross-linguistic outlook of the main conference, we are particularly interested in papers that compare linguistic construals across different languages. Also, we would like to include interdisciplinary perspectives from the behavioural and cognitive sciences.

The topics that can be addressed in the workshop include, but are not limited to,

the role of construal operations such as perspectivation and specificity in language production and processing;

the acquisition and diachronic change of linguistic categories;

the question of whether individual construal operations that have been proposed in the literature are cognitively realistic (see e.g. Broccias & Hollmann 2007) and whether they can be tested empirically;

the refinement of construal-related concepts such as “salience” or “prominence” based on empirical findings (see e.g. Schmid & Günther 2016);

the relationship between linguistic construal operations and domain-general cognitive processes;

the relationship between empirical observations and the conclusions we draw from them about the organization of the human mind, including the viability of concepts such as the “corpus-to-cognition” principle (see e.g. Arppe et al. 2010) or the mapping of behavioral findings to cognitive processes.

Please send a short abstract (max. 1 page excl. references) and a ~100-word summary to construal.iclc15@gmail.com by August 31st, 2018 September 10th, 2018. We will inform all potential contributors in early September whether your paper can be included in our workshop proposal. If we are unable to accommodate your submission, you can of course submit it to the general session of the conference. The same applies if our workshop proposal as a whole is rejected.

Goschler, Juliana. 2017. A contrastive view on the cognitive motivation of linguistic patterns: Concord in English and German. In Stefan Hartmann (ed.), Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 2017, 119–128.

Kirby, Simon. 2012. Language is an Adaptive System: The Role of Cultural Evolution in the Origins of Structure. In Maggie Tallerman & Kathleen R. Gibson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution, 589–604. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Over at ICCI are a couple of blog posts by Olivier Morin about project I’m involved in, the Color Game. The first post provides an introduction to the app and how it will contribute to research on language and communication. And, as I mentioned on Twitter, the second blog post highlights one of the Color Game’s distinct advantages over traditional experiments:

One really cool aspect about working on the Color Game is the diversity of participants. See more here: https://t.co/s5aENGCUJg

An ambitious project

What I want to briefly mention is that the Color Game is an extremely ambitious project that marks the culmination of two years worth of work. A major challenge from a scientific perspective has been to design multiple projects that get the most out the potential data. Experiments are normally laser-focused on meticulously testing a narrow set of predictions. This is quite rightly viewed as a positive quality, and it is why well-designed experiments are far better suited for discerning mechanistic and causal explanations than other research methods. But I think the Color Game does make some headway in addressing long-standing constraints:

Limitations in sample size and representation.

Technical challenges of scaling up complex methods.

Underlying motivation for participation.

Sample size and representation

Discussions about the limitations of experiments in terms of sample size and the sample they are representing are abundant. Such issues are particularly prevalent in the ongoing replication and reproducibility crisis. Just looking at the first week of data for the Color Game and there are already over a 1000 players from a wide variety of countries:

Color Game players from around the world. Darker, redder colours indicate more concentrated regions of players. From: http://cognitionandculture.net/blog/color-game/the-color-games-world

By contrast, many psychological experiments will be lucky to get an n of 100, and this number is often determined on the basis of reaching sufficient statistical power for the analyses (cautionary note: having a large sample size can also be the source of big inferential errors). It is also the case that standard psychology populations are distinctly WEIRD. Apps can help connect researchers with populations normally inaccessible, especially given the proliferation of mobile phones.

Technical challenges

The Color Game’s larger and more diverse sample leads to my second point: that scaling up complex methods is both costly and technically challenging. Even though web experiments are booming, and this can mitigate the downside of having a small n, they are often extremely simple and restricted. Prioritising simplicity is fine if it is premised on scientific principles, but there is also the temptation to make design choices for reasons of expediency.

So, to give one example, if you want participants to complete your experiment, then making the experiment shorter (through restricting the number of trials and/or the time it takes to complete a trial) increases the probability of finishing. It can also lead to implementing methodological decisions to make the task technically easier. All else being equal, it is simpler to create a pseudo-communicative task (where the participant is told they are communicating with someone, even though they aren’t) than it is to create an actual communicative task. Same goes for using feedback over repair mechanisms.

All experiments are faced with these problems. But, anecdotally, it seems to be acutely problematic for web-based experiments. Just to be clear: I’m not making a judgement about whether or not a study suffered from making a particular methodological choice. The point is to simply say that these design choices should (where possible) first consider the scientific consequences above technical and practical expediency. My worry is that when scientific considerations are not prioritised, you lose too much in terms of generalisability to real world phenomena. And, even when this is not the case and the experiment is justifiably simple, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that this creates a bias in the types of web experiments performed. In short, there’s the possibility that web-based experiments systematically underutilise certain methodological designs, leading to a situation where web-experiments occupy and explore a much narrower region of the design space.

I hope that the Color Game makes some small steps towards avoiding this pitfall. For instance, we incorporated features not often found in other web-based communication game experiments, such as the ability to communicate synchronously or asynchronously and for participants to engage in simple repair mechanisms instead of receiving feedback. Players are also free to choose who they want to play with in the forum, giving a much more naturalistic flavour to the interaction dynamics. This allows for self-organisation and it’ll be interesting to see what role (if any) the emergent population structure plays in structuring the languages. App games therefore offer a promising avenue for retaining the technically complex features of traditional lab experiments whilst profiting from the larger sample sizes of web experiments.

Having a more complex set up also allowed us to pre-register six projects that aim to answer distinct questions about the emergence and evolution of communication systems. To achieve a similar goal with other methods is far more costly in terms of time and money. But there are downsides. One of which is that the changes and requirements imposed by a single project can impact the scope and design of all the other projects. Imagine you have a project which requires that the population size parameter is manipulated (FYI, this is not a Color Game project): every other project now needs to control for this fact be it through methodological choices (e.g., you only sample populations with x number of players) or in the statistical analyses.

In some sense, this reintroduces the complexity of the real-world back into the app, both in terms of its upsides and downsides. Suffice to say, we tried to minimise these conflicts as much as possible, but in some cases they were simply unavoidable. Also, even if there are cases where this introduces unforeseen consequences in the reliability of our results, we can always follow up on our findings with more traditional lab experiments and computer models.

Underlying motivation

Assuming I haven’t managed to annoy anyone who isn’t using app-based experiments, I’ve saved my most controversial point for last. It’s a hard sell, and I’m not even sure I fully buy it, but I think the underlying motivation for playing apps is very different from participating in a standard experiment. At the task level, the Color Game is not too dissimilar from other experiments, as you receive motivation to continue playing via points and to get points in the first place you need to be successful in communication. Where it differs is in terms of why people participate in the first place. In short, the Color Game is different because people principally play it for entertainment (or, at least, that’s what I keep telling myself). Although lab-based experiments are often fun, this normally stands as an ancillary concern that’s not considered crucial to the scientific merits of a study.

Undergraduate experiments are (in)famously built on rewards of cookies and cohort obligations, and it is fair to say that most lab experiments incentivise participation via monetary remuneration (although this might not be the only reason why someone participates). Yet, humans engage in all sorts of behaviours for endogenous rewards, and app games are really nice examples of such behaviour. People are free to download the game (or not), they can play as little or as much as they please, and as I’ve already mentioned there is freedom in their choice of interaction partners. Similarly, in the real-world, people have flexibility in when and why they engage in communicative behaviour, with monetary gain being just a small subset (e.g., a large part of why you don’t have to go far to find a motivational speaker is because they earn money for public lectures and other speaking events).

If you’re interested, and want to see what all the fuss is about, feel free to download the app (available on Android and iOS):

This year at EvoLang, I’m releasing CHIELD: The Causal Hypotheses in Evolutionary Linguistics Database. It’s a collection of theories about the evolution of language, expressed as causal graphs. The aim of CHIELD is to build a comprehensive overview of evolutionary approaches to language. Hopefully it’ll help us find competing and supporting evidence, link hypotheses together into bigger theories and generally help make our ideas more transparent. You can access CHIELD right now, but hang around for details of the challenges.

The first thing that CHIELD can help express is the (sometimes unexpected) causal complexity of theories. For example, Dunbar (2004) suggests that gossip replaced physical grooming in humans to support increasingly complicated social interactions in larger groups. However, the whole theory is actually composed of 29 links, involving predation risk, endorphins and resource density:

The graph above might seem very complicated, but it was actually constructed just by going through the text of Dunbar (2004) and recording each claim about variables that were causally linked. By dividing the theory into individual links it becomes easier to think about each part.

Second, CHIELD also helps find other theories that intersect with this one through variables like theory of mind, population size or the problem of freeriders, so you can also use CHIELD to explore multiple documents at once. For example, here are all the connections that link population size and morphological complexity (9 papers so far in the database):

The first thing to notice is that there are multiple hypotheses about how population size and morphological complexity are linked. We can also see at a glance that there are different types of evidence for each link. Some are supported from multiple studies and methods, while others are currently just hypotheses without direct evidence.

However, CHIELD won’t work without your help! CHIELD has built-in tools for you – yes YOU – to contribute. You can edit data, discuss problems and add your own hypotheses. It’s far from perfect and of course there will be disagreements. But hopefully it will lead to productive discussions and a more cohesive field.

Which brings us to the challenges …

The EvoLang Causal Graph challenge: Contribute your own hypotheses

You can add data to CHIELD using the web interface. The challenge is to draw your EvoLang paper as a causal graph. It’s fun! The first two papers to be contributed will become part of my poster at EvoLang.

Here are some tips:

Break down your hypothesis into individual causal links.

Try to use existing variable names, so that your hypothesis connects to other work. You can find a list of variables here, or the web interface will suggest some. But don’t be afraid to add new variables.

Try to add direct quotes from the paper to the “Notes” field to support the link.

If your paper is already included, do you agree about the interpretation? If not, you can raise an issue or edit the data yourself.

I’ll be writing an article about the database and some initial findings for the Journal of Language Evolution. If you contribute 5 papers or more, then you’ll be added as a co-author. As an incentive to contribute further, co-authors will be ordered by the number of papers they contribute. This offer is open to anyone studying evolutionary linguistics, not just people presenting at EvoLang. You should check first whether the paper you want to add has already been included.

Bonus Challenge: Contribute some code, become a co-author!

CHIELD is open source. The GitHub repository for CHIELD has some outstanding issues. If you contribute some programming to address them, you’ll become a co-author on the journal article.

We live in an age where we have more data on more languages than ever before, and more data to link it with from other domains. This should make it easier to test hypotheses involving adaptation, and also to spot new patterns that might be explained by adaptation. For example, the proposed link between climate and tone languages could never have been investigated without massive global databases. However, there is not much discussion of the overall approach to research in this area.

This week I published a paper in a special issue on the Adaptive Value of Langauges, outlining the maximum robustness approach to these problems. I then try to apply this approach to the debate about the link between tones and climate.

In a nutshell, I suggest that research should be:

Robust

Instead of aiming for the most valid test for a hypothesis, we should consider as many sources of data and as many processes as possible. Agreement between them supports a theory, but differences can also highlight which parts of a theory are weak.

Causal

Researchers should be more explicit about the causal effects in their hypotheses. Formal tools from causal graph theory can help formulate tests, recognise weaknesses and avoid talking past each other.

Incremental

Realistically, a single paper can’t be the final word on a topic, and shouldn’t aim to. Statistical studies of large-scale, cross-cultural data are very complicated, and we should expect small steps to establishing causality.

I applying these ideas to the debate about tone and climate. Caleb Everett also published a paper in this issue showing that speakers in drier regions use vowels less frequently in their basic vocabulary. I test whether the original link with tone and the new link with vowels holds up when using different data sources and different statistical frameworks. The correlation with tone is not robust, while the correlation with vowels seems more promising.

I then suggest some ideas for alternative methodological approaches to this theory that could be tested. For example:

An iterated artificial learning experiment

A phonetic study of vowel systems

A historical case-study of 5 Bantu languages

A corpus study of tone use in Cantonese and conversational repair in Mandarin

In 2016, Casey Hattrey combined literary genres that had long been kept far apart from each other: science fiction, academic funding applications and cultural evolution theory. Space Funding Crisis I: Persister was a story that tried to “put the fun in academic funding application and the itch in hyper-niche”. It was criticised as “unrealistic and too centered on academics to be believable” and “not a very good book”. Dan Dediu’s advice was “better not even start reading it,” and Fiona Jordan’s review was literally a four-letter word. Still, that hasn’t stopped Hattrey from writing the sequel that the title of the first book tried to warn us about.

The badly conceived artwork for Resister

Space Funding Crisis II: Resister continues to follow the career of space linguist Karen Arianne. Just when she thought she’d gotten out of academia, the shadowy Central Academic Funding Council Administration pulls her back in for one more job. Or at least a part-time post-doc. Her mission: solve the mystery of the great convergence. Over thousands of years of space-faring, human linguistic diversity has exploded, but suddenly people have started speaking the same language. What could have caused this sinister twist? Who are the Panini Press? And what exactly is research insurance? Arianne’s latest adventure sees her struggle against ‘splainer bots, the conference mafia and her own inability to think about the future.

To say that this was the “difficult second book” would give too much credit to the first. Hattrey seems to have learned nothing about writing or science since the last time they ventured into the weird world of self-published online novels. The characters have no distinct voice, the plot doesn’t make much sense and there are eye-watering levels of exposition. In the appendix there’s even an R script which supports some of the book’s predictions, and even that is badly composed. Even some of the apparently over-the-top futuristic ideas like insurance for research hypotheses are a bit behind existing ideas like using prediction markets for assessing replicability.

If there is a theme between the poorly formatted pages, then it’s emergence: complex patterns arising from simple rules. Arianne has a kind of spiritual belief in just reacting, Breitenberg-like, to the here-and-now rather than planning ahead. Apparently Hattrey intends this to translate into a criticism of the pressures of early-career academic life. But this never really materialises out of the bland dialogue and insistence on putting lasers everywhere.

Still, where else are you going to find a book that makes fun of the slow science movement, generative linguistics and theories linking the emergence of tone systems to the climate?

Submissions are being sought for a special issue of Language and Cognition on Experimental approaches to iconicity in language. We welcome submissions related to any aspect of the many forms and functions of iconicity in natural language (see below). Papers may feature new experimental findings, or may present novel theoretical syntheses of experimental work on iconicity in language. Manuscripts should be a maximum of 8,000 words, with shorter submissions preferred.

Many researchers in language and cognition now recognize that iconicity – resemblance between form and meaning – is a fundamental feature of human languages, spoken and signed alike (Nuckolls 1999; Taub 2001; Perniss, Thompson, & Vigliocco, 2010; Dingemanse et al., 2015; Perry, Perlman & Lupyan, 2015; Ortega, 2017). Iconicity is found across all levels
of linguistic structure, spanning discourse, grammar, morphology, lexicon, phonology and phonetics, and even orthography. It is found in the prosody of speech and sign and in the gestures that accompany linguistic behaviour.

While experimental research on iconicity in speech has long favoured the study of pseudowords like bouba and kiki, a growing body of experimental research shows that iconicity plays an active role in a number of basic language processes, cutting across cognition, development, cultural and biological evolution. The special issue aims to feature some of the most exciting new experimental research on the many forms, functions, and
timescales of iconicity in human language.

Special issue editors
Marcus Perlman, University of Birmingham
Pamela Perniss, University of Brighton
Mark Dingemanse, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

How to submit. If you would like to contribute, please email us an 800-1000-word abstract by 1st April, 2018. Abstracts should be sent to Marcus Perlman (m.perlman@bham.ac.uk). We will return a decision on your abstract by 15th April, and first submissions will be due on 15th August. Manuscripts will be submitted through the Language and Cognition submission interface. We aim to put out the complete issue by the beginning of 2019. Notably, submissions that proceed faster can appear online first.

A lot of evolutionary talks and papers nowadays touch upon language complexity (at least nine papers did this at the Evolang 2016). One of the reasons is probably that complexity is a very convenient testbed for testing hypotheses that establish causal links between linguistic structure and extra-linguistic factors. Do factors such as population size, or social network structure, or proportion of non-native speakers shape language change, making certain structures (for instance, those that are morphologically simpler) more evolutionary advantageous and thus more likely? Or don’t they? If they do, how exactly?

Recently, quite a lot has been published on that topic, including attempts to do rigorous quantitative tests of the existing hypotheses. One problem that all such attempts face is that complexity can be understood in many different ways, and operationalized in yet many more. And unsurprisingly, the outcome of a quantitative study depends on what you choose as your measure! Unfortunately, there currently is little consensus about how measures themselves can be evaluated and compared.

To overcome this, we organize a shared task “Measuring Language Complexity”, a satellite event of Evolang 2018, to take place in Torun on April 15. Shared tasks are widely used in computational linguistics, and we strongly believe they can prove useful in evolutionary linguistics, too. The task is to measure the linguistic complexity of a predefined set of 37 language varieties belonging to 7 families (and then discuss the results, as well as their mutual agreement/disagreement at the workshop). See the detailed CfP and other details here.

So far, the interest from the evolutionary community has been rather weak. But there is still time! We extended the deadline until February 28 and are looking forward to receiving your submissions!

As mentioned in this blog before, evolutionary thinking can help the study of various cultural practices, not just language. The perspective of cultural evolution is currently seeing an interesting case of global growth and coordination – the widely featured founding of the Cultural Evolution Society (also on replicatedtypo), the recent inaugural conference and follow-ups are bringing a diverse set of researchers around the same table. If this has gone past you unnoticed – there’s nice resourcesgathered on the society website.

Evolutionary thinking seems useful for various purposes. However does it work the same everywhere, and can research progress in one domain be easily carried over to another?

We invite contributions from cultural evolution researchers of various persuasions and interests to talk about their work and how the evolutionary models help with that. Deadline for abstracts on Feb 14.

Discussion of individual contributions will hopefully lead to a better understanding of commonalities and differences in how cultural evolution is applied in different areas, and help build an understanding of how to most productively use evolutionary thinking – what are the prospects and limitations. We aim to allow for building a common ground through plenty of space and opportunities for formal and informal discussion on site.

Both case studies and general perspectives welcome. In addition to original research we encourage participants to think of the following questions:

– What do you get out of cultural evolution research?

– How should we best apply evolutionary thinking to culture?

– What matters when we apply this to different domains or timescales?

Deadline for abstracts: February 14, 2018

Event dates: June 6-8

Location: Tartu University, Estonia

Full call for papers and information on the website. Also available as PDF.

Panorama of Tallinn from the sea (Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ATallinnPan.jpg, by Terker, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Jonas Nölle, Peeter Tinits and I are going to submit a workshop proposal to next year’s Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE), which will be held in Tallinn from August 29th to September 1st, 2018. We thought this would be a nice opportunity to bring evolutionary linguistics to SLE – and a also a good opportunity to discuss novel and innovative approaches to language evolution in a condensed workshop setting.

Please note that there will be – as usual at SLE – a three-step selection process:

Step 1: You submit a 300-word abstract to us (the organizers: newdir.langev@gmail.com) by November 10th. We then select up to 12 papers that we include in our workshop proposal. As we want the “New directions” in our title to be more than a shallow phrase, we will base our selection as much as possible on the innovativeness of the abstracts we receive. If we’re unable to consider your paper for the workshop, there’s still the option to submit to the general session.

Step 2: Our workshop proposal is then reviewed by the scientific committee, and we’ll receive a notification of acceptance or rejection by December 15th. Good news: If you’ve submitted an abstract, there’s nothing for you to do at this point except for keeping your fingers crossed.

Step 3: If the workshop is accepted, we will ask you to submit a 500-word abstract via the conference submission system, which will be peer-reviewed like any general session paper. Notifications of acceptance or rejection can be expected in March 2018.

We’re looking forward to your contributions, and regardless of the outcome of our proposal, we hope to see many of you in Tallinn!

Here’s our CfP, which will also appear on Linguist List and on the official SLE2018 website soon:

Research on language evolution is undoubtedly among the fastest-growing topics in linguistics. This is not a coincidence: While scholars have always been interested in the origins and evolution of language, it is only now that many questions can be addressed empirically drawing on a wealth of data and a multitude of methodological approaches developed in the different disciplines that try to find answers to what has been called “the hardest problem in science” (Christiansen & Kirby 2003). Importantly, any theory of how language may have emerged requires a solid understanding of how language and other communication systems work. As such, the questions in language evolution research are manifold and interface in multiple ways with key open questions in historical and theoretical linguistics: What exactly makes human language unique compared to animal communication systems? How do cognition, communication and transmission shape grammar? Which factors can explain linguistic diversity? How and why do languages change? To what extent is the structure of language(s) shaped by extra-linguistic, environmental factors?

Over the last 20 years or so, evolutionary linguistics has set out to find answers to these and many more questions. As, e.g., Dediu & De Boer (2016) have noted, the field of language evolution research is currently coming of age, and it has developed a rich toolkit of widely-adopted methods both for comparative research, which investigates the commonalities and differences between human language and animal communication systems, and for studying the cumulative cultural evolution of sign systems in experimental settings, including both computational and behavioral approaches (see e.g. Tallerman & Gibson 2012; Fitch 2017). In addition, large-scale typological studies have gained importance in recent research on language evolution (e.g. Evans 2010).

The goal of this workshop is to discuss innovative theoretical and methodological approaches that go beyond the current state of the art by proposing and empirically testing new hypotheses, by developing new or refining existing methods for the study of language evolution, and/or by reinterpreting the available evidence in the light of innovative theoretical frameworks. In this vein, we aim at bringing together researchers from multiple disciplines and theoretical backgrounds to discuss the latest developments in language evolution research. Topics include, but are not limited to,

empirical research on non-human communication systems as well as comparative research on animal cognition with respect to its relevance for the evolution of cognitive prerequisites for fully-fledged human language (Kirby 2017);

approaches using computational modelling and robotics (Steels 2011) in order to investigate problems like the grounding of symbol systems in non-symbolic representations (Harnad 1990), the emergence of the particular features that make human language unique (Kirby 2017, Smith 2014), or the question to what extent these features are domain-specific, i.e. evolved by natural selection for a specifically linguistic function (Culbertson & Kirby 2016);

If you are interested in participating in the workshop, please send an abstract (c. 300 words) to the organizers (newdir.langev@gmail.com) by November 10th. We will let you know by November 15th if your paper is eligible for the proposed workshop. If our workshop proposal is accepted, you will be required to submit an anonymous abstract of ca. 500 words via the SLE submission system by January 15th. If our proposal is not accepted or if we cannot accommodate your paper in the workshop, you can still submit your abstract as a general session paper.

The International Association for Cognitive Semiotics in cooperation with OCAD Universityand Ryerson University is pleased to announce The Third Conference of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics (IACS3 – 2018) July 13–15, 2018 Toronto, Ontario, Canada: iacs-2018.org

Plenary speakers confirmed (as of August 15, 2017)

John M. Kennedy • University of Toronto

Kalevi Kull • University of Tartu

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone • University of Oregon

Conference Theme: MULTIMODALITIES

This non-restrictive theme is intended to encourage the exploration of pre-linguistic and extra-linguistic modes of semiotic systems and meaning construal, as well as their intersection with linguistic processes.

Cognitive Semiotics investigates the nature of meaning, the role of consciousness, the unique cognitive features of human beings, the interaction of nature and nurture in development, and the interplay of biological and cultural evolution in phylogeny. To better answer such questions, cognitive semiotics integrates methods and theories developed in the human, social, and cognitive sciences.

The International Association for Cognitive Semiotics (IACS, founded 2013) aims at establishing cognitive semiotics as a trans-disciplinary study of meaning. More information on the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics can be found at http://iacs.dk

The IACS conference series seeks to gather together scholars and scientists in semiotics, linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, psychology and related fields, who wish to share their research on meaning and contribute the interdisciplinary dialogue.